Player Choice in Dragon Age Games: Illusion versus Reality

What do people mean by changed... he is possessed by a justice spirit. Any fun character would change. Frankly, I prefer the DA2 Anders. DAA Anders was an embarrassing coward.

Players make an error, I think, in measuring player choice by looking at outcomes.

The player shouldn't get to decide whether a character lives or dies. The player can only choose what his or her character tries to do. As long as the outcome makes sense within the setting, there's no problem.

The headless Leliana problem, though, is largely a function of the visuals being divorced from the mechanics.

Sten can’t actually die in DAO, not definitively, he can only leave the party or get left in Lothering.

ah, Leliana and Wynne retconns, good times.

Wynne was the frustrating one for me. I mean whether you kill her or stays alive, she dies anyway in a fucking book.

It's pathetic to say the least.

Yeah but, from what I read and how it looks, Wynne's death in the book is canon regardless of any world state, at least as far as I know.

Well, having control over events from a book obviously sounds silly, I won't argue there.

Fun fact:  Justice was originally supposed to bond with Velanna.

Was changed to Anders since he has a stronger link to the Circle of Magi...

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I can honestly say I've never been bothered by a Bioware game having few to no obvious consequences for a decision I made. I'm much more annoyed when particular scenes railroad my characters into behaving unlike themselves to justify some new development.

The whole point of an RPG, in my mind, is to give the player a somewhat ambiguous protagonist with which to immerse themselves in the setting, as a sort of anchor point. The personality/general mentality/temperament/whatever you ascribe to the character becomes your self-expression in the world, and that invests you in the story. The story itself doesn't have to branch hugely for you to feel that you've properly expressed what your character is about in any given scene.

As long as the different forms of expression make sense and are numerous and consistent enough for me to engage in ways I find interesting and unique, I couldn't be happier. Even if the ultimate reward is nothing more than an epilogue spiel, or nothing at all. Like in real life, the satisfaction is in knowing that you took a proper look around the situation and acted in a sensible and appropriate way to your own mind, or whichever mentality you decided to go in with.

By contrast, if the options you're given for expressing your character are inconsistent or just shallow... then what the hell is the point? You can't create anything you identify with, so why even have the mechanic? To me, that's the slippery slope Bioware - and other RPG developers - have been dancing on these past few years, particularly with the adoption of the dialogue wheel. I've no complaints about their story branching. No, not even the end of ME3.

I think that in any game which is not a self contained story the choices you make can only have a limited impact going forward to the next instalment if the writers have a particular direction they want to take with the plot or the characters they have introduced.

People have mentioned Baldurs Gate series and thinking back, in the original Baldurs Gate you could ditch Imoen, reject Jaheira and Khalid, fight Minsc and never get to rescue Dynaheir, leave Viconia to be killed by her pursuers rather than recruited, and any or all of these characters could be killed along the way or in the final battle. Yet Baldurs Gate 2 begins with you having been captured along with all of these, even if some of these have been killed off before the game gets underway and both Jaheira and Viconia are romance options this time round. Also in Baldurs Gate if you so choose you can kill the iconic game world character of Drizzt, only for you to encounter him again in BG2, this time with this friends. Of course the Forgotten Realms actually had spells for raising the dead and resurrection to account for people being around after being killed and if the game records that you killed Drizzt, he behaves differently from someone who helped him, but the general principle is there. It is not possible to accommodate all player choices if you are working on a continuing story.

Actually, I feel Mass Effect trilogy did a pretty good job in this respect, having substitute roles in place of characters who do not make it through to ME2 or ME3. The problem with Leliana in Dragon Age would appear to be the graphics that can leave her decapitated, as we had already been introduced to the idea of a spirit preventing someone's death with Wynne, also explaining how she can survive the PC killing her. So a spirit preserving Leliana is not an introduction to game lore for which we hadn't been prepared. Morrigan can also be stabbed in Witch Hunt but her fate was left ambiguous because of her falling through the eluvian. The same was true of Sten if you leave him in his cage. Had Leliana's fate been similarly unsure I think there would have been less grounds for complaint.

I seem to recall that the writers have learned from the backlash over Leliana because they have made it clear that in future any character capable of being killed by the PC on screen will not play a major part in future games. I stress the on screen part because it is possible they might bring back people, like Calpernia, who you only see jump off the cliff but never see a body at the bottom. On the whole, though, I think the stress on "needing new people" in the epilogue to Trespasser is the writers way of saying that we should not expect to see too many characters from the south in the next game. Dorian is likely an exception because they went to great lengths to place him back up in Tevinter by the end of the story, with him helping to found the Lucerni and becoming a Magister no matter what relationship he had with the Inquisitor.

I would imagine that most of our choices reflected in the Keep will only affect how certain codices read or how people or outcomes are referred to in the game without having to devote a great deal of resources to actually showing them.